What’s so great about that? Ars editors pick the most overrated games

There are no sacred cows on this list of popular games we just don't get.

Everybody has at least one: a game that, for one reason or another, just never appealed to you despite its presence on the "best games of all time" list for many people. A game that you're almost ashamed to admit to hating in polite company, for fear that you'll be branded a gauche iconoclast (or, worse, an ignorant troll). A game that makes you question not just your tastes, but the concept of popular taste as a whole. I mean, what do people see in that game? This is an anthology of those games for some of Ars' editors.

We go into this list knowing that our picks are going to be baffling to some of you, and that we're in the extreme minority with most of these picks. That's kind of the point. Before you accuse us of just trying to "stir the pot" with intentionally subversive picks, know that the author of each of these blurbs truly and honestly just doesn't like the game being discussed. Also know that, no matter how popular a game or series is among the general public, we fully believe that every game has its flaws, and that there is no title that can (or should) be universally loved by literally everybody.

With that, let the slaughtering of the sacred cows begin!

Dragon's Lair

by Kyle Orland

I was too young to catch the whole Dragon's Lair craze in the '80s, but I distinctly remember the first time I saw the game sitting alone in a movie theater lobby sometime in the early '90s. My reaction can be divided into three distinct stages.

Stage 1 (After seeing the game's "attract mode" animation from across the lobby): Holy crap? What is... how do they get graphics like that? Is there a VCR under there? The whole game doesn't really look like that, does it? No... it can't. Can it?

Stage 2 (After putting in a dollar—A WHOLE DOLLAR—to try it out): Oh my god, the game does actually look like that! I'm actually going to get to control a real cartoon! This is so awesome!

Stage 3 (After making a total of one correct move before dying three times in succession): What the hell was that? That sucked!

Dragon's Lair seems to keep getting ported to new platforms in the decades since I first saw it had that arcade experience (most recently winning a coveted Steam Greenlight spot), so there must be some market of nostalgia-filled gamers whose opinions of the game probably gelled during Stage 1 and 2 above. And while I can appreciate the artistry of the animation, which still holds up today, I find the see-a-flash-and-hit-a-corresponding-button gameplay just truly, utterly, stupefyingly bad.

This isn't just sour grapes after one tough arcade play either... I spent a good deal of time struggling with a CD-ROM version years later just so I could see more of those wonderful, fluid, moving drawings. It didn't change my opinion one bit. As a short film (or even a choose-your-own adventure "interactive" movie), Dragon's Lair would be amazing. As a game, it's awful.

Gears of War

by Sean Gallagher

For Christmas in 2006, there were two things on my wish list: An Xbox 360 and Gears of War. I wasn't disappointed on Christmas morning—the disappointment wouldn't arrive until some time around New Year's.

There were some innovative things about Gears of War's combat engine (shoot from cover! OMG!), and it held up well in multiplayer. But the single-player campaign came nowhere near living up to the wave of hype that Gears of War rode in on. The plot was plodding and monotonous. The AI for "squad members" and the list of commands available to direct them made them more of a liability than an asset most of the time. And then there were the absurd mechanics of that chainsaw assault rifle.

Unfortunately, after the Xbox 360 etched a scratch into my first copy of the game, I actually had to buy a second before I figured out it probably wasn't even worth paying for once.

Halo

by Lee Hutchinson

Halo, how I dislike thee. A first-person shooter with few redeeming qualities, it's the kind of game that would have been released into obscurity had it not been a launch title for the original Xbox. The game sported mediocre graphics, a cliche-filled and unoriginal single-player campaign, and a tired and uninspiring set of multiplayer options. In spite of these detriments, its position as the only multiplayer first-person shooter available to Xbox users guaranteed its success. Apparently when you're dying of thirst in the desert, any drink will do, even if it's your own pee.

Halo's success is particularly cringe-worthy considering how ridiculously inferior it was to first-person shooters available on PC. Its contemporaries include classic AAA titles like Aliens vs. Predator 2, Ghost Recon, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, all of which were vastly superior to Halo in every way but one: they weren't available to Xbox users clamoring for a way to frag their buddies.

The game spawned a plethora of (much better, actually fun) sequels and has legions of fans, but the first game in the series was just plain bad.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

by Andrew Cunningham

I think it was Twilight Princess that ultimately prompted me to give up on modern Zelda games. From the outset, there was something about it that felt perfunctory. It was obviously trying very hard to build a deeper, story-driven game on top of Ocarina of Time's sturdy foundation. And while there were certainly moments of greatness strewn amidst TP's bloated, 30-something-hour running time, in the end it just felt like Zelda-by-the-numbers. Get your sword. Go to the dungeon. Find item (dah dah dah daaaaaah!). Beat dungeon and boss with item. Explore around until you finally find the next dungeon. Repeat.

Twilight Princess was really just the culmination of a long-running trend. Both Zelda and Mario, two of Nintendo's biggest flagships, are respectful of their roots to the point that they sometimes feel fenced in by their conventions. But Mario has taken what made the original games so fun—precision platforming, great level design, and pick-up-and-play gameplay—and pushed it to the fore. Newer games have even forgone the tiresome, empty hub worlds of Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy in favor of a format that puts as little time between turning on the console and playing a level as possible.

Zelda, on the other hand, has taken the best elements from the NES and SNES entries—puzzle solving, exploration, and swordplay, in roughly that order—and weighed them down with over-long tutorials, interminable cutscenes, and fetch quests that pad the games' running time without really adding much to the fun. Twilight Princess added insult to injury by replacing the precise button controls with gratuitous controller waggling (in the Wii version), making it by far my least favorite entry in the series (though, to be fair, I haven't even given Skyward Sword a chance after Twilight Princess scared me off the series).

367 Reader Comments

You should have stated this at the beginning of your wall of text because this fact makes your opinion completely irrelevant. Good lord, hated Doom? Please stop identifying yourself as a gamer right now.

Really? Explain to me what exactly (if anything) was good about doom? I could name 100 things that sucked about doom that were not even related to technical restraints at the time. The ONLY thing Doom had going for it versus other games of the time was 3d. And none of the sequels (including quake) improved that any. Just different weapons and uglier enemies.

I could have played a text version of Doom with a programmed macro and it wouldn't have made any difference.

I think people are being unfair with Halo. I keep seeing posts like "Oh wow, I could jump on Tribes or Quake and zoom all over the place in the time it takes to walk around a map in Halo." Yeah, well that's still true today. Compare Tribes Ascend to any other FPS that isn't Quake Arena; nothing comes close. I grew up playing both PC and console games. Before I ever played Halo I had Unreal, Quake II, Half-Life, etc., yet Halo had something none of those games did. Local co-op, the ability to play through the entire campaign with my brother sitting next to me. I played through Half-Life, Unreal, and Quake II once and only once. Once I beat them, I had no desire to replay them. With Halo, I beat the campaign at least ten times over the years and my brother was beside me every one of those times. To this day I've never completed a games campaign more than twice and even though Halo had it's share of problems, I still would say that it was a great game and even though there's a lot of games out there now with co-op, I've never played any of them with the same fervor as I did with Halo. There was just something special about it.

Also, getting 8 people together for a lan party was the tits. Sure you could do it with your PC, but it was nowhere near as easy to do. All you needed was 2 Xboxes, 2 TVS, and a lan cable and you were off. Doing rockets only on Hang Em' High is still a ton of fun to this day.

Ooh Halo - I played it for years, on the PC even (I never had any consoles), and all was good. But then I started playing TF2, and when I went to take a look at Halo again it suddenly felt like the air was molasses. I just couldn't get used to it. And then there was the lag.. And that was the last time I played Halo.

Yes, that 2007 MP game smashed the hell out of the 2001 SP game.

The SP part of Halo wasn't even that bad..

And so there's some years between them. That's an excuse for bad graphics, not for feeling slo-mo and lagging like hell.

edit: besides, it's not like I have to justify a personal experience, right? (right?!) It's not like I was saying "Halo is shit, look at this new game that totally pwns it" - I liked Halo. I just don't like it anymore.

Your comparison still doesn't make any sense. Few games hold up that well over time and trends change. And I have no idea what you mean by slo-mo and lagging like hell unless you're talking about how when you jump in Halo there's a period of time when you're in the air because of the game's gravity.

I completely agree with Halo. I was knee-deep in the PC shooters of the time when that came out and all my console friends starting bragging about how great it was, but I never could get over the fact that it was a C game at best. It's fun sure, kind of like McDonalds fries taste good from time to time, and I own it just for the occasional "lets see where this started" moment. But it NEVER was an impressive shooter.

Even more galling was the fact that several of those Halo-obsessed friends of mine continued to insist for years that Half-Life was a generic Halo knockoff. Or that Halo was the first FPS to ever include vehicle combat. Or be set OUTSIDE.

The things we can convince ourselves of right?

I think a lot of people are ignoring how Halo took everything about a FPS and finally made it work perfectly on a console. People are short-selling all the things Halo did right that everything else prior to it did wrong. And even from coming from the same background as you (Unreal, Half-Life, Quake II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein) Halo offered me something those games didn't have, local co-op.

From another poster:"Let me be clear here: playing Halo with 16 guys in one room on 4 T.V.'s was mind-blowing in the early 2000's. This really opened the doors to guys who couldn't afford a P.C. or who were casual about video games and brought them into a world of glamorous FPS.

If you want to take out 'innovative' and 'culture changing' out of reasons why a game might be good, then I guess you can say Halo was overrated.

Do homework. It's easy to judge something in hindsight and make any argument for yourself when you are blind to its context."

Lastly, I thought the original X-COM was overrated. It's rather perplexing for the first few hours. If you put up with that, it's pretty fun for a while, but it stopped being fun for me after about 5 hours. Something about battles with 12 characters taking forever when you have to be super-cautious for every step, plus the fact that even if you're cautious bad luck can wipe out half your squad, plus the whole needing to capture a commander alive when none of the ships I found ever contained one.

Boy, that brought back some memories. I never beat X-COM for exactly that reason, although I remember playing for days.

4X games were overrated to me, and even some RTS, but only the endgames. Specifically Civ, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, and Starcraft. The beginning and middle were always great fun, even when you got your ass kicked and had to restart over and over. But the endgame meant either extreme tedium and burnout as you attempt to micromanage resources and army, or you lose because the AI f*cks everything up. Eventually it always seemed like you were fighting the game interface and not the other empires, and I'm not that hardcore of a wargamer to enjoy it, even though I still finish the game. Just really anticlimatic.

Nailed it with Dragon's Lair. I remember being transfixed by that game when I was a kid. It really stood out amongst the BurgerTime and DigDug machines nearby. I'm glad I was too young to have money, otherwise I would have pumped quarter after quarter into that monstrosity in a silly attempt to memorize a bunch of joystick sequences.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinions but Halo was able to evoke the feeling of exploring an alien landscape for me. Say what you want about competing computer FPSs at the time, but nothing else I played around then could come close to that single-player experience.

Likelihood of this comment being read: very low. Still, there were a couple of games I'd like to add to this list.

BioShockYes, the graphics were friggin' amazin', and the idea of fighting in a secret underwater city with genetically enabled superpowers in the middle of the '50s was...outlandish, to say the least.

But in my opinion, it suffered from the same problems as Dragon's Lair: it was visually stunning, but didn't have much to back it up. Inventory consisted of only a few guns, plasmids/weapons could only be wielded one at a time, and the shops? Don't even get me started on them. It was cool to hear the "Welcome to the Circus of Values" message the first couple times, then it just became downright annoying.

And the storyline? Forgive me for looking for a good story in a game (look no further than BF3, BF:BC2, Far Cry 3, Hitman series), but running around from place to place without really being given a reason is not a story.

Some of these issues were solved in BioShock 2 (namely, dual wielding), but after the experience of BioShock, I just couldn't bring myself to keep playing it, especially since they kept in that annoying "Circus of Value" thing.

But the part that got to me is the story. North Koreans? Aliens? Sorry man, but once your story brings in aliens (hostile ones, no less), that's the point at which it's just ridiculous. (Half-Life avoided this by having the aliens look like humans, and allying with humans following your defeat of the end boss, whose name escapes me right now.) And the far more annoying part to me was using stealth mode: any attacks you made instantly drained your energy and unstealthed you. Until I watched other people, I never figured out that if you manually unstealth, strength, throw, then stealth again, you can preserve most of your suit's energy. Even then, it was rather difficult on PC since your suit mode had to be chosen off a wheel rather than a key.

Crysis 2 was an improvement by adding dedicated keys & removing speed mode, but still kept what I think was a relatively unused/useless weapon customization system.

I never finished either game, though friends have told me that I was pretty close to finishing Crysis 1.

The most overrated/disappointing game to me has to be Diablo 3. I loved Diablo 2 but they dumbed D3 down so much it might as well be Diablo: Facebook Edition. No skill points, no stat points and having everything based off of weapon damage took any nuance out of character building.

I thought that for most builds on Diablo 2, you had to rely on good gear on hell level. How is what you saying different?

But in regards to the games, I would imagine that someone who would like Dark Souls may not like Zelda, because they are different games. Or if they like both, it is because they understand the appeal for different audiences. Even Farmville, its appeal is that it could suck up your time whilst online. My brother-in-law still plays it to this day (obviously he has too much time on his hands).

To me, this list isn't about over-rated games, but an insight on the preferences of the Ars team - in terms of gaming. What they think appeals to them, and how the particular game they earmark hasn't lived up to their expectation. Psychology 101.

Perhaps Ars staffers are too young to go back that far, or they assume the majority of their readers are too young (or both)? I'm only 39...

I had thought of that, though I'm 'only' 26, and have been gaming since I was 3. What's the entire staff of Ars Technica possible excuse? At the very least, the Gaming Editor had an actual game that was more than a decade old.

I'm happy to post page after page of disses on popular games I don't like, on any system you'd care to name, going back to about 1984 when I got my first Atari system. I'm not sure how relevant my screed against Yar's Revenge would be, though, or my angry rantings against the IBM-compatible Temple of Apshai Trilogy.

The staff here has plenty of old-skool gaming cred and I'll throw down against anyone who wants to argue 80s and 90s video gaming anywhere, any time. You pick the time period, system, and genre, and I'll supply the vitriol. If you're gonna front, youngster, you better bring it.

You mean that my precious Wii was a gimmicky console all this time!? Round 2 (the WiiU) just started.. how am I to enjoy "First Party Rehash Part VII - New Control Scheme" with these wicked, logical thoughts in my mind!

Not exactly surprised SMB made it on one of those lists. SMB is a real game for actual hardcore gamers. It's really refreshing to have a game like this because we live in a world of too easy games all around. Finally having some challenge in a game made it the best game of the year for me.

It's fine that you like having games telling you everything and giving you everything on a platter. But there are some people who prefers working for rewards. It gives value to said rewards.

I'd have to say the Uncharted games... while I do enjoy a good story and I can usually put up with "stuff" to get through I could never get into these games... not for lack of trying mind you... they just never grabbed me...

Same here. All that came felt like was - go to this large area, here is some stuff to hide behind, shoot. repeat. repeat. oh! you get to climb some here! oh, new open area, shoot these people....

it felt like the same action over and over again just in different scenery.

Not exactly surprised SMB made it on one of those lists. SMB is a real game for actual hardcore gamers. It's really refreshing to have a game like this because we live in a world of too easy games all around. Finally having some challenge in a game made it the best game of the year for me.

It's fine that you like having games telling you everything and giving you everything on a platter. But there are some people who prefers working for rewards. It gives value to said rewards.

I've played a lot of ROM hacks that test your reflexes to the limit, and I've played many that only test your patience. SMB is notable for being a particularly funny and well made platform hell, but it's not a challenge any more than a Match-3 card game.

An unforgettably beautiful, haunting and uh, unforgettable world completely ruined by the disappointment that every fight was just playing paint-by-the-numbers QuickTime events only enjoyable by obsessive compulsive nitwits who love the game below,

God of War,See above, but minus the unforgettable world part and plus a gazillion repetitive hordes easily dispatched by finger aching button mashing.

Man, to this day Halo gets on my nerves. Can't really properly explain why, but I can never stop myself to point out how mediocre it is whenever it is brought up. It is like a mass illusion where everyone pretends it is a completely different game.

I have never played the sequels, but it is a bit silly such a game spawned a franchise at all. I guess it is the unfairness of it all, where my favourite games never got such treatment

Also, I've never heard anyone say anything positive about Dragon's Lair besides the graphics, so I'm not sure it is overrated at all.

And yet people seem to be able to contain themselves about so many other FPS's that were mediocre. Interesting that.

When I was in art history I remember it being taught to us that "Art is defined by the reaction of the observer." (Whether the reaction is positive or negative doesn't matter since some art is meant to deliberately provoke.)

Halo must be some seriously fine art to provoke such reactions. (On either side.)

I think a lot of people are ignoring how Halo took everything about a FPS and finally made it work perfectly on a console. People are short-selling all the things Halo did right that everything else prior to it did wrong. And even from coming from the same background as you (Unreal, Half-Life, Quake II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein) Halo offered me something those games didn't have, local co-op.

From another poster:"Let me be clear here: playing Halo with 16 guys in one room on 4 T.V.'s was mind-blowing in the early 2000's. This really opened the doors to guys who couldn't afford a P.C. or who were casual about video games and brought them into a world of glamorous FPS.

If you want to take out 'innovative' and 'culture changing' out of reasons why a game might be good, then I guess you can say Halo was overrated.

Do homework. It's easy to judge something in hindsight and make any argument for yourself when you are blind to its context."

1. Local co-op was on plenty of FPS games going way back. Seriously???? DOOM had coop mode for christ's sake...

2. "culture changing", yeah, this has nothing to do with a game being good. I'm being very serious. Some could argue the transformers movies have been culture changing for a group of tweens, but that doesn't make them good....at all.

It seems that everyone here defending Halo has to two common arguments:

1. You can't compare it to PC titles (false). Games don't exist in vacuums, this is like arguing Ishtar is the greatest movie ever because it's the only one that runs on your beta max.

2. Halo did X when no other game did (false). You simply didn't play enough PC games. Plenty of great FPS games on the PC at the time with expansive outdoor landscapes and fantastic multiplayer vehicle interaction (Operation Flash point has very large online battles at the time, but battlefield was probably the king). COOP mode has already been addressed. Your girlfriend/family could play...seriously, I played coop with my girlfriend all the way through system shock 2. I attended so many home and warehouse LAN parties before 1999 that I can't even count them, so your 16 player house party does not impress me. It was easier, yes, but it's easier to play cards with your friends too.

I guess from my point of view, I could argue that FPS still doesn't work right on consoles, I guess it's "good enough" to get people to buy stuff.

I think so many people love Halo because it was the only thing they could play, that and they no longer got beat up by jocks for playing it. Just because your local high school bully has seen the transformers movie, doesn't make it better than Cowboy Bebop. Accessibility is probably the leading cause of "overrated" in this world.

Totally agree with you on Halo. An average game judged as great by those who've never experienced better.

For exactly the same reasons I'd add Goldeneye to the list. It was significant as the first really playable console FPS, but compared to its contemporaries on the PC, especially Half-Life, it was pretty average.

After reading almost all comments I think what blew right past many people's heads is that this is not an objective article by any means. It's simply a collection of games that the person in question thinks is overrated.

A game doesn't have to be bad to be overrated, it can be a decent or good game that people for whatever reason claims to be the best. And again - this is all subjective, not objective. I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that Halo is overrated because in my eyes it's a slow clumsy shooter that de-emphasizes the skills normally needed to properly play an FPS at high levels and introduces regenerating health to make things easier for console play. That doesn't necessarily mean I didn't enjoy playing through it once, it just means I think it's not as good as people say.

Despite the great love of Indie titles lately, I've found most of the one's I've tried have largely sucked. Also mods that every one gushes over are largely incomplete and sucky. For every good Indie title and every great mod, there is an awful lot of complete crap.

A few other people mentioned Angry Birds. Yeah, I don't get the appeal either. It's supposed to be physics based, but it seems to have way too large a chunk of luck for that to be true. If you could reliably stick those birds in the same place and have the same result, it would be an enjoyable puzzle game.

On the other hand, "Bad Piggies" (from the same publisher) is hilarious, even if it still has a good chunk of luck involved.

The staff here has plenty of old-skool gaming cred and I'll throw down against anyone who wants to argue 80s and 90s video gaming anywhere, any time

I tried to, but then I remembered how expensive games were back then and how precious little reviews I read at times (magazines were for the tapes and discs, not the reviews). No game was over rated, no matter how bad, it had to be played and played and played.

Now that I can buy games inexpensively and install and uninstall them in a flash, I can look on many with distain. Canabalt springs to mind...

So a tech site posts an opinion article that gets a bunch of opinionated responses from people taking the article seriously...

Am I the only one that found the reasons why people found games I like to be overrated insightful?

Also, why hasn't Starsiege Tribes 2 been mentioned as a counterpoint to the Halo multiplayer discussions? It came out half a year before Halo, and had vehicular combat and teamplay with 16 times as many players as the original Halo's multiplayer did.

Halo's singleplayer never particularly impressed me (Copy/paste level design? Overwraught space opera story that switches gears randomly half way through? The Library?) but I can't rubbish the whole game because of those flaws. The mechanics opened up first person shooters on a controller. Which is cool. But I do find everything else about the game overrated.

That game had a positive impact on first person shooters. For example, it introduced more realistic limits on the amount of gear you can carry around. Many older shooters would give you access to an enormous inventory of weapons and equipment that you could switch to on demand at any moment. Halo limited you to two weapons and just a few grenades. That made sense, and it also forced players to be strategic when deciding which weapons to carry. The game was also noteworthy for having the best controls for a console shooter ever (even better than Goldeneye). After Halo, the general public seems to have accepted the notion that console controls are good enough for excellent shooters. So, we can ditch the keyboard and mouse because that level of precision is not strictly necessary. Finally, the covenant were a really cool and interesting enemy. I'll never forget how terrifying it was when I first encountered an energy sword wielding elite general on a bridge in Halo 1.

The most overrated/disappointing game to me has to be Diablo 3. I loved Diablo 2 but they dumbed D3 down so much it might as well be Diablo: Facebook Edition. No skill points, no stat points and having everything based off of weapon damage took any nuance out of character building.

Diablo 3 was a superior game to Diablo 2. The truth is that loot grabbers have simply lost their shine for some people over time. Diablo 2 has nostalgia going for it, but its system sucked, and still sucks, and the gameplay is inferior.

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You mean that my precious Wii was a gimmicky console all this time!? Round 2 (the WiiU) just started.. how am I to enjoy "First Party Rehash Part VII - New Control Scheme" with these wicked, logical thoughts in my mind!

I dunno; tablet interfaces are much more useful than motion controls, and two screens does allow for more real options. Its a lot less gimmicky than motion controls. How many games will actually take advantage remains to be seen.

I've played a lot of ROM hacks that test your reflexes to the limit, and I've played many that only test your patience. SMB is notable for being a particularly funny and well made platform hell, but it's not a challenge any more than a Match-3 card game.

Challenging reflexes and muscle memory is no more or less "challenging" than other forms of challenge, and SMB actually challenges you, unlike many games which do not.

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When I was in art history I remember it being taught to us that "Art is defined by the reaction of the observer." (Whether the reaction is positive or negative doesn't matter since some art is meant to deliberately provoke.)

Yeah, but you have to remember that artists are actually completely unreliable when it comes to any sort of rational reasoning processes. Hence the whole modern art movement, and claims that it is "real art" versus people pointing out it is just a sucker's bet.

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For exactly the same reasons I'd add Goldeneye to the list. It was significant as the first really playable console FPS, but compared to its contemporaries on the PC, especially Half-Life, it was pretty average.

Firstly, Half-Life came out a year after Goldeneye did. Secondly, honestly, I never really liked Half-Life all that much.

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Despite the great love of Indie titles lately, I've found most of the one's I've tried have largely sucked. Also mods that every one gushes over are largely incomplete and sucky. For every good Indie title and every great mod, there is an awful lot of complete crap.

Indie games are worse on average than AAA titles for obvious reasons. Always have been. That doesn't mean that there aren't terrible AAA titles.

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I have to disagree with you about Halo. That game had an enormous positive impact on first person shooters. For example, it introduced more realistic limits on the amount of gear you can carry around. Many older shooters would give you access to an enormous inventory of weapons and equipment that you could switch to on demand at any moment. Halo limited you to two weapons and just a few grenades. That made sense, and it also forced players to be strategic when deciding which weapons to carry.

Except, beyond not actually being realistic (why can't you carry around four pistols, why does it not matter if you're carrying around the two lightest or two heaviest weapons in the game?) its actually not really a good thing. The problem is that it substitutes having a large number of different weapons for an inventory management puzzle and it disincentivizes experimenting with new weapons because they might suck.

Or to put it bluntly: it wasn't a good thing at all. People copied it because Halo was popular, not because it was a good gameplay idea.

I don't get any of the hype around halo. Maybe this was because I never had an xbox, so whenever I was at a friends house and they wanted to play they would absolutely demolish me, and I never played it. Getting your ass whooped that much that often is sure to leave a sour taste in most peoples mouth. On the other hand playing 007 Nightfire in multi player mode was super fun, as far as I remember we played it around the same time as Halo and that had some cool game modes and it was just fun to play in groups (looking through the scope only to see odd job's hat flying towards you anyone?)Metal Gear Solid was another one I didn't get into, I'm not sure if it's the FPS style or what does it in for me (I like some FPS games), but another one of those critically acclaimed games that I just didn't get a grasp on.

(1) The entire Grand Theft Auto series - "sandbox" games necessarily have less focus, much of the open world is functionally empty, and the crime simulator is kind of sick.(2) Farmville - I don't want your radishes; get off my wall(3) Angry Birds - I have no idea why people enjoy this infantile, simple game(4) World of Warcraft - repetitive fetch quests, level grinding, gold farming, and a monthly fee

Also, why hasn't Starsiege Tribes 2 been mentioned as a counterpoint to the Halo multiplayer discussions? It came out half a year before Halo, and had vehicular combat and teamplay with 16 times as many players as the original Halo's multiplayer did.

Codename Eagle did it about two years before Halo.

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The mechanics opened up first person shooters on a controller. Which is cool.

quantum meruit wrote:

The game was also noteworthy for having the best controls for a console shooter ever (even better than Goldeneye). After Halo, the general public seems to have accepted the notion that console controls are good enough for excellent shooters. So, we can ditch the keyboard and mouse because that level of precision is not strictly necessary.

This is one of the reasons I dislike Halo. It spoilt FPS games. Mouselook control is infinity more natural and effective than any joystick/pad. If it hadn't been for the popularity or Goldeneye and Halo then sooner or later someone would have released a console with a mouse/trackball style controller. Instead FPS's limp along insisting we do the gaming equivalent of painting with an Etch-a-sketch.

Halo redefined and refined the FPS to an extent which altered the expectations pretty much forever. The pacing, design, and sheer polish were pretty much dead on. Them's just the facts. It's pretty much essential 'reading' for any game developer. Having it on a list like this just feels like an attempt to be provocative.

Shadow of the Colossus should pretty much just be here on its own with 2 pages of explanation as to why it was utter shite. No other game has shown the blind adoration that being quirky, pretty, and Japanese will garner from some sections of the gaming press. An entire game of painful and pointless quicktime segments. It actually made me throw my controller.